One of the sub-themes of the banner Thanksgiving Day-Black Friday-Cyber Monday long weekend was how well mobile sales performed. However, unless you were JC Penney, Apple or Macy's, your mobile customer might well have left your site with a negative impression of your operations.
Those were the three quickest-loading e-commerce sites of top e-retailers on Cyber Monday according to web site performance firm Compuware Gomez, via Internet Retailer. The company found that site slowdowns were endemic on Cyber Monday. "E-commerce sites slowed more than ever in the cyber onslaught," a Compuware spokeswoman told the publication. "Most had real trouble scaling to meet demand, but J.C. Penney had little performance degradation."
Yes, They Noticed
And yes, your customers noticed, according to a separate survey from Tealeaf. It found even the top 35 retailers have customer experience issues that can stifle sales and turn away customers.
More than 40% of online conversations about mobile shopping with the top 35 mobile retailers reflected customer frustration during the Thanksgiving weekend, it said. In addition, more than half (58%) of the negative conversations about mobile shopping with the leading mobile retailers focused specifically on customer struggle issues, including payment problems and search-and-sort problems; one-fifth (21%) called out features that would have made the experience easier for them but weren't available.
An Old Story
Such issues are not news to mobile retailers, or consumers for that matter. Some 32% of smartphone and tablet owners say that concerns about security have prevented them from making a mobile purchase, matched by the proportion who say that their shopping has been impeded by difficulties seeing the full product information on their device screen, according to a survey by Motricity, conducted by Wakefield Research.
It found that slow or unreliable internet connections (31%) closely follows as a leading deterrent, while about one-quarter of respondents cite problems with entering purchase information as a hindrance to making a purchase via their device.
